Category Archives: War in Libya

Arabs say Gaddafi must go, wary of Western action

Reuters reports:

Muammar Gaddafi’s appeal for Arab solidarity in the face of foreign air strikes fell on deaf ears across the Middle East on Sunday, but support for his opponents was mixed with deep suspicion of Western motives.

Western forces have unleashed their biggest military attack in the Arab world since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, targeting Gaddafi’s air defences and armoured vehicles near the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east of the country.

A few hours after the first missiles struck, Gaddafi called on “citizens of the Arab and Islamic nations” and other developing countries to “stand by the heroic Libyan people to confront this aggression”.

But Arabs from North Africa to the Gulf, many demanding political rights for the first time, dismissed the appeal from a leader whose four decades of authoritarian and capricious rule have exhausted any reserves of sympathy.

“It is now clear and understandable that Arab people want to get rid of their leaders, so leaders should simply leave and not fight their people and force foreign nations to interfere,” said Mohamed Abdel Motaleb, a bank employee in Cairo, where mass protests toppled veteran president Hosni Mubarak last month.

“I am very much against foreign troops fighting in Libya, but Arab leaders should not let that happen through their stubbornness and refusal to quit power”.

A Libyan government official said 64 people died in the Western air strikes and the head of the Arab League, which supported Libyan no-fly zone, said the organisation had not endorsed attacks on ordinary Libyans.

“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” Amr Moussa said, announcing an emergency Arab League meeting to discuss Libya.

The overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and Tunisia’s Zine al Abidine bin Ali — as well as mass protests against leaders in Yemen and Bahrain — have restored a dormant Arab pride which was crushed by decades of autocracy and foreign intervention.

But many people in the Arab world, while anxious to see the end of Gaddafi’s rule, felt that the resort to Western military action has tarnished Libya’s revolution.

“Who will accept that foreign countries attack an Arab country? This is something shameful,” said Yemeni rights activist Bashir Othman.

OIL OR DEMOCRACY?

Support for military action was also muted by deep-seated suspicions that the West is more concerned with securing access to Arab oil supplies than supporting Arab aspirations.

“They are hitting Libya because of the oil, not to protect the Libyans,” said Ali al-Jassem, 53, in the village of Sitra in Bahrain, where protests by the Shi’ite Muslim majority against the Sunni ruling Al-Khalifa family have triggered military reinforcement by neighbouring Gulf Arab forces.

A spokesman for Bahrain’s largest Shi’ite opposition party Wefaq questioned why the West was intervening against Gaddafi while it allowed oil-producing allies to support a crackdown on protesters in Bahrain in which 11 people have been killed.

“We think what is happening in Bahrain is no different to what was happening in Libya,” Ibrahim Mattar said. “Bahrain is very small so the deaths are significant for a country where Bahrainis are only 600,000.”

In Iraq, where U.S.-led forces invaded eight years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, opposition to Gaddafi was tempered by the years of violence which Iraq endured after Saddam’s downfall, as well as anger at perceived double standards.

“Bombing Gaddafi’s forces is a step in the right direction but turning blind eyes to the slaughter of innocent protesters in Bahrain is a step in the wrong direction,” said Amir Ahmed, owner of a home appliance shop in Baghdad’s Karrada district.

The leader of Lebanon’s Shi’ite group Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said many people had spelt out their support for the protests in Egypt and Libya, “but when Bahrain is involved… their ink dries up”.

“What is the difference between the Al-Khalifa regime and the regimes of (Hosni) Mubarak and Gaddafi?” he said in a televised speech on Saturday night.

But criticism of the West has not translated into support for Gaddafi, who has bemused or infuriated leaders across the Arab world during his four decades in power.

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The fight for Libya

The Los Angeles Times reports:

With his popularity at a record low and facing an election next year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in desperate need of a boost to his political stature.

And on Saturday, he got it.

The French leader, once dubbed Super Sarko by the local press for his eagerness to take the reins in global crises, summoned leaders from four continents to an emergency war council at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris to agree on military action against strongman Moammar Kadafi in Libya.

His 20 guests had barely reached an agreement when Sarkozy announced that French planes were already in the air preparing to strike.

With almost theatrical gravitas, Sarkozy said France had “decided to assume its role, its role before history” in stopping Kadafi’s “killing spree” against people whose only crime was to seek to “liberate themselves from servitude.”

Barely more than three years ago, Sarkozy gave Kadafi the red carpet treatment in Paris, welcoming him with open arms and allowing the Libyan leader to pitch a Bedouin tent near the Elysee. Now the French president was announcing that he was sending warplanes in to bomb him.

Beside Sarkozy was British Prime Minister David Cameron, France’s partner in the military offensive, talking tough but overshadowed by his Gallic counterpart.

The Guardian reports:

In Britain, the question Cameron was asked in the Commons after his statement on Friday was an understandable one: is the UK capable of such a military endeavour? The prime minister – speaking coincidentally eight years to the day since Tony Blair asked parliament for its backing for the invasion of Iraq – was in no doubt that the country was in good shape for the campaign, and he reminded MPs that the UK was still the world’s fourth-biggest spender on defence.

Indeed, it is arguable that one of the figures vindicated by events over the past 48 hours was Liam Fox. The defence secretary has overseen a sometimes brutal, relatively successful, campaign to lessen the size of the cuts to trim the Ministry of Defence’s £36bn of debt, arguing that Britain needs to retain its capability to strike quickly and decisively in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Libya, in more ways that one, has bolstered his cause. Only on Thursday – hours before the no-fly zone was approved by the UN – a confident-sounding Fox was promising defence unions that he would still find ways to reduce the fallout of last year’s strategic defence and security review, by promising to save thousands of threatened civilian jobs. Yet, just a fortnight earlier, he had kicked off the month by confirming that more than a 1,000 jobs would be axed from the RAF by September, with almost 1,700 to follow. Speculation clouded the future of the Tornado GR4 strike aircraft with reports that the squadron at RAF Lossiemouth would be axed.

Libya, Fox might believe, would put a stop to such reports, reaffirming the need for a varied and sizeable air force. The Tornado, after all, has excelled in battle and is likely to be the first British assets used against Gaddafi.

Foreign Policy reports:

As the U.N. Security Council voted the evening of March 17 to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, the international media broadcast the joyous reaction from the streets of Benghazi, the de facto capital of the Libyan opposition. Thousands of Libyans celebrated in the streets, waving the old Libyan flag that has become the revolution’s standard and firing guns happily into the air. A spokeswoman for the Libyan opposition said that the revolutionaries were “embracing each other” over the U.N. decision.

But until recently, Benghazi’s attitude toward outside intervention was different. The rebels’ attitude toward the role of the international community evolved as Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces advanced aggressively over the past week, threatening to use their superior firepower to quash the poorly armed rebellion.

Only two weeks ago, professionally designed posters were plastered on billboards around Benghazi’s elegant palm tree-lined streets reading: “No foreign intervention. Libyan people can do it alone.” Men and women in the city reacted defiantly to suggestions they needed outside support. Qaddafi had already tried to pin the uprising on al Qaeda — they wanted change to come exclusively from a homegrown movement free from allegations of outside influence.

Views quickly changed as Qaddafi’s military continued to advance across the country’s east. Even as the Security Council met to announce its decision, Qaddafi’s forces were shelling Ajdabiya, the last town on their march toward Benghazi. In a radio address, Qaddafi — perhaps in a show of propaganda — vowed that his forces would reach Benghazi that night, and that they would “show no mercy and no pity” to the rebels.

The New York Times reports:

In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.

Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.

Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.

The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.

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Operation Odyssey Dawn

A few hours ago I had it mind to note that one of the distinctions of the attack on Libya was that even after it had begun, it had yet to receive a name. The fact that French jets were screeching across the sky above Benghazi, yet TV commentators could not with gravitas preface the announcement of their presence with a suitably grandiose title, did actually underline the fact that warfare is and should be a last resort — not something that can be carefully premeditated and branded as though it was a product for sale.

I guess I should have realized that the naming ceremony was being reserved for the Pentagon, with its compulsion to announce the unleashing of any fusillade of cruise missiles with the title of a summertime Hollywood blockbuster.

Perhaps the strangest and yet most telling piece of messaging is that the US attack would be launched while the commander in chief is on an overseas jaunt.

The message being? That it underlines that the United States is playing a strictly supporting role in this operation? That this is business as usual for America and if the president can enjoy a trip to Brazil while the bombs drop then so should the rest of the country continue with its own distractions? Or, that Obama is so ambivalent about his role that he is much more comfortable simply delegating responsibility to the next man in the chain of command, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — who happened to make his objections to this operation quite transparent? And if the latter is the case, perhaps this does in a somewhat regal fashion underline that ultimately Obama is the decision maker, not just the deliberator.

Meanwhile, to those who remain spellbound by memories of 2003 I would suggest imagining this:

It’s March 2003, a month after the beginning of the spectacular Iraqi uprising that had begun once again in Basra. Caught by surprise, Saddam loyalists had been pushed back all the way to Baghdad and for a brief period it looked like the regime might collapse. Iraqis across the country were eager to claim their democratic rights, deeply inspired by the fact that to their west, the Saudi royal family had unceremoniously be evicted and to their east, a peaceful democracy movement had led Ayatollah Khamenei to rescind the ideology of vilayat-e faqih and transfer full constitutional power to an elected assembly. Yet although the uprising had swept the length and breadth of Iraq, the enthusiasm of ordinary people could not withstand Saddam’s brutality and his willingness to use all necessary means to reassert control over the country. For a few weeks, irregular forces had fought bravely to defend their gains, but now the Iraqi army was in the process of reclaiming territory, city by city.

George Bush, at that time a president who had not actually launched a war, suggested that America could at least provide a supporting role as, much to everyone’s surprise, Europe formed a coalition including Arab nations intent on preventing Saddam from strangling Iraqi democracy at its birth. Would there have been strong objections in the Middle East or the West?

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